Health Communication Theory

Teresa L. Thompson, Peter J. Schulz, Teresa L. Thompson, Peter J. Schulz

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119574507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

Assembles the most important theories in the field of health communication in one comprehensive volume, designed for students and practitioners alike

Health Communication Theory is the first book to bring together the theoretical frameworks used in the study and practice of creating, sending, and receiving messages relating to health processes and health care delivery. This timely volume provides easy access to the key theoretical foundations on which health communication theory and practice are based. Students and future practitioners are taught how to design theoretically-grounded research, interventions, and campaigns, while established scholars are presented with new and developing theoretical frameworks to apply to their work.

Divided into three parts, the volume first provides a summary and history of the field, followed by an overview of the essential theories and concepts of health communication, such as Problematic Integration Theory and the Cultural Variance Model. Part Two focuses on interpersonal communication and family interaction theories, provider-patient interaction frameworks, and public relations and organizational theories. The final part of the volume centers on theories relevant to information processing and cognition, affective impact, behavior, message effects, and socio-psychology and sociology. Edited by two internationally-recognized experts with extensive editorial and scholarly experience, this first-of-its-kind volume:

• Provides original chapters written by a group of global scholars working in health communication theory
• Covers theories unique to interpersonal and organizational contexts, and to health campaigns and media issues
• Emphasizes the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of health communication research
• Includes overviews of basic health communication theory and application
• Features commentary on future directions in health communication theory

Health Communication Theory is an indispensable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying health communication, and for both new and established scholars looking to familiarize themselves with the area of study or seeking a new theoretical frameworks for their research and practice.

PART I
Perspectives on the Field of Health Communication

1
The Basics of Health Communication Theory

Teresa L. Thompson and James D. Robinson

Health problems are prevalent all over the world, and communication processes play essential roles in addressing these health problems. From Ebola, MERS, Zika, and COVID‐19 to vaping and the opioid epidemic, various health crises must be confronted across the world on a constant basis. The area of study that has come to be called “health communication” is crucial as practitioners and scholars attempt to alleviate and minimize a multitude of health problems and improve health care delivery. Effective and useful health communication is foundational as we attempt to control the spread of disease and health problems.

Do message strategies that encourage people to manage their diet to control diabetes also inspire them to look more closely at vaccination decisions? In other words, can we generalize what we learn about health communication regarding one health problem to other health issues? Does the study of patient‐centered communication have implications for mental health as well as physical health and illness? Does message targeting or tailoring allow the effective adaptation of anti‐vaping messages to different audiences? These and other questions are conceptual and theoretical concerns that underlie health promotion and a broader understanding of health communication processes. Through health communication research one may understand not only how communication operates in relation to a particular health issue, but how health communication functions more broadly. Indeed, the ultimate hope is an increased understanding of communication processes across contexts and a healthier world.

As is evident in the title of this volume, the focus of this book is on the theories that we use to study health‐related processes. Our goal is to help students, scholars, and practitioners more adequately examine health communication concerns by grounding their work in solid theory. We thus begin the volume by briefly defining health communication, health, health care delivery, and theory. We then talk about why theory is important in the study of health communication. We follow this with brief discussions of the traditions of health communication theory and generative tensions in health communication scholarship. This chapter concludes with a preview of the remainder of the book and a discussion of ethical concerns.

What is Health Communication?

It is frequently noted that the area of study that has become known as health communication began to emerge from research in the 1940s that looked at the persuasive impact of health information and promotion, although Salmon and Poorisat (2019) point to even earlier traditions from the field of public health. This work goes back to the development of germ theory and can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century. Starting with newspapers and then moving to film, radio, and television, media campaigns about health issues began to appear. The emergence and refinement of social science research methods, including the development of Thurstone and Likert‐type scales and sampling techniques à la George Gallup, was another central factor in the progress that was made during earlier decades of the twentieth century. Salmon and Poorisat (p. 1) identify four key factors that influenced and characterized this growth:

1. the early use of mass communication for public health campaigns (1900–1910s);
2. the search for effects (1920–1930s);
3. the search for explanation from interdisciplinary perspectives (1940–1950s); and
4. the formal recognition of health communication as a distinct and valuable field of practice and research (1960s).

The reader will see these influences reflected in the theories and chapters that follow.

The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, which began in 1971, was also an important development in the history of health communication. During the early 1970s scholars such as Barbara Korsch and her colleagues (e.g. Korsch and Negrete, 1972) conducted work that served as the foundation of research on physician–patient communication. This work, published in such prestigious outlets as Scientific American, created interest within the broader field of communication. Some of this work was labeled “medical communication.” Simultaneously, scholars building on the interactional view articulated in Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson’s (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication and further developing the conceptualization of communication processes offered by Gregory Bateson (1972) focused on what was called “therapeutic communication.” These traditions came together beginning in the early‐1970s to prompt the development of the new area of study called “health communication.” The inception of the Health Communication Division of the International Communication Association in 1975 (following the founding of the Health Communication Interest Group in 1972) most clearly demarcated this new area of study. The movement within medicine, public health, and the social sciences from a biomedical approach to a biopsychosocial view was simultaneously occurring (see Ho and Sharf, Chapter 14 in this volume, for more discussion of this).

The area of health communication did not take long to develop. Books on the topic, most notably Kreps and Thornton’s (1982) Health Communication: Theory and Practice, began to emerge in the early 1980s. By 1986, enough work was being conducted in the area that the publisher Lawrence Erlbaum Associates expressed interest in a journal on health communication. The first author of the present chapter, who is also the editor of the journal Health Communication, began soliciting submissions in 1987, and the first issue of the journal came out in January of 1989. The journal originally published four issues a year, but at the time of the writing of this chapter is publishing 14 lengthy issues a year. During 2019, the journal processed 776 submissions. Two hundred and nine issues of the journal have now been published. Health Communication was shortly followed by The Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, Patient Education and Counseling, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, Communication and Medicine, and several other outlets. The Journal of Health Communication began publishing in 1996. The first edition of the Handbook of Health Communication (chapters of which were translated into Korean) was published in 2003, and the second edition, The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication was published in 2011. The third edition of the handbook is in press at the time of the writing and will be published in 2021. The Sage Encyclopedia of Health Communication came out in 2014. All of these publications are evidence of the rapid growth of this area of study.

International interest in health communication has also increased notably over the last three decades. This is reflected in the subtitle of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspective...